In my experience anything that Xcode promises to just work, just doesn't but yes they have at least improved provisioning.

The original point was that there are steps to go through, and creating a paid developer account is a non trivial step

There are steps to go through for android too. The original comment about deployment is false, and doesn't make any distinction about one time setup.

> That's also because deploying an APK on a test device (or several devices) is way easier than deploying an IPA on an iOS device.

False.

> it's easy to push the APK to my phone as part of the build process, and I don't even have to plug my device in to do so.

Also true of iOS.

If you want to make the case that enrolling in the developer program is a hassle, that's fine, but it's misleading to make it sound as though that is part of the build process.

Mucking around with provisioning profiles, schemes, and certificates is a part of iOS development that totally sucks.

True but has nothing to do with what was claimed.

You need to create a paid developer account on Android too.

No, you do not need any paid account in order to compile an APK and install it on any number of devices. I could paste a link to an APK right here, and if you were visiting it from your phone, you could install it directly from that downloaded file.

This works on any number of devices.

You need a Google Play Developer account in order to distribute through the Google Play store, but you can directly install an application on an unlimited number of devices for free without ever signing up for an account. This is not possible on iOS without jailbreaking every phone.